The Language Issue

I place my hope on the water
in this little boat
of the language, the way a body might put
an infant

in a basket of intertwined
iris leaves,
its underside proofed
with bitumen and pitch,

then set the whole thing down amidst
the sedge
and bulrushes by the edge
of a river

only to have it borne hither and thither,
not knowing where it might end up;
in the lap, perhaps,
of some Pharoah's daughter.

By Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill [Ceist na Teangan]
Translated by Paul Muldoon

Image from the ballet Fille Du Pharoan (1898)
posted at http://album.aufeminin.com/album/seeall_137966_6/Tutus-et-tenues-de-scene.html

Some People

Some people know what it's like,

to be called a cunt in front of their children
to be short for the rent
to be short for the light
to be short for school books
to wait in Community Welfare waiting-rooms full of smoke
to wait two years to have a tooth looked at
to wait another two years to have a tooth out (the same tooth)
to be half strangled by your varicose veins, but you're
198th on the list
to talk into a banana on the jobsearch scheme
to talk into a banana in a jobsearch dream
to be out of work
to be out of money
to be out of fashion
to be out of friends
to be in for the St Vincent de Paul man
to be in space for the milk man
(sorry, mammy isn't in today she's gone to Mars for the weekend)
to be in Puerto Rico this week for the blanket man
to be in Puerto Rico next week for the blanket man
to be dead for the coal man
(sorry, mammy passed away in her sleep, overdose of coal in the teapot)
to be in hospital unconscious for the rent man
(St Judes ward 4th floor)
to be second-hand
to be second-class
to be no class
to be looked down on
to be walked on
to be pissed on
to be shat on

and other people don't.

by Rita Ann Higgins
from The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women's Poetry 167-2000

Image from
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/cellphones/5.html

The Pomegranate

The only legend I have ever loved is
The story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names.
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere. And have.
As a child in exile in
A city of fogs and strange consonants,
I read it first and at first I was
An exiled child in the crackling dusk of
The underworld, the stars blighted. Later
I walked out in a summer twilight
Searching for my daughter at bed-time.
When she came running I was ready
To make any bargain to keep her.
I carried her back past whitebeams
And wasps and honey-scented buddleias.
But I was Ceres then and I knew
Winter was in store for every leaf
On every tree in that road.
Was inescapable for each one we passed.
And for me.
It is winter
And the stars are hidden.
I climb the stairs and stand where I can see
My child asleep beside her teen magazines,
Her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.
The pomegranate! How did I forget it?
She should have come home and been safe
And ended the story and all
Our heart-broken searching but she reached
Out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.
She put out her hand and pulled down
The French sound for apple and
The noise of stone and the proof
That even in the place of death,
At the heart of legend, in the midst
Of rocks full of unshed tears
Ready to be diamonds by the time
The story was told, a child can be
Hungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance.
The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured.
The suburb has cars and cable television.
The veiled stars are above ground.
It is another world. But what else
Can a mother give her daughter but such
Beautiful rifts in time?
If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
The legend will be hers as well as mine.
She will enter it. As I have.
She will wake up. She will hold
The papery, flushed skin in her hand.
And to her lips. I will say nothing.

by Eavan Boland
from The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women's Poetry 1967-2000

This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison

Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,
This lime-tree bower my prison ! I have lost
Beauties and feelings, such as would have been
Most sweet to my remembrance even when age
Had dimm'd mine eyes to blindness ! They, meanwhile,
Friends, whom I never more may meet again,
On springy heath, along the hill-top edge,
Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance,
To that still roaring dell, of which I told ;
The roaring dell, o'erwooded, narrow, deep,
And only speckled by the mid-day sun ;
Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock
Flings arching like a bridge ;--that branchless ash,
Unsunn'd and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves
Ne'er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still,
Fann'd by the water-fall ! and there my friends
Behold the dark green file of long lank weeds,
That all at once (a most fantastic sight !)
Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge
Of the blue clay-stone.

Now, my friends emerge
Beneath the wide wide Heaven--and view again
The many-steepled tract magnificent
Of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea,
With some fair bark, perhaps, whose sails light up
The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two Isles
Of purple shadow ! Yes ! they wander on
In gladness all ; but thou, methinks, most glad,
My gentle-hearted Charles ! for thou hast pined
And hunger'd after Nature, many a year,
In the great City pent, winning thy way
With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain
And strange calamity ! Ah ! slowly sink
Behind the western ridge, thou glorious Sun !
Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb,
Ye purple heath-flowers ! richlier burn, ye clouds !
Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves !
And kindle, thou blue Ocean ! So my friend
Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood,
Silent with swimming sense ; yea, gazing round
On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem
Less gross than bodily ; and of such hues
As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes
Spirits perceive his presence.

A delight
Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad
As I myself were there ! Nor in this bower,
This little lime-tree bower, have I not mark'd
Much that has sooth'd me. Pale beneath the blaze
Hung the transparent foliage ; and I watch'd
Some broad and sunny leaf, and lov'd to see
The shadow of the leaf and stem above
Dappling its sunshine ! And that walnut-tree
Was richly ting'd, and a deep radiance lay
Full on the ancient ivy, which usurps
Those fronting elms, and now, with blackest mass
Makes their dark branches gleam a lighter hue
Through the late twilight : and though now the bat
Wheels silent by, and not a swallow twitters,
Yet still the solitary humble-bee
Sings in the bean-flower ! Henceforth I shall know
That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure ;
No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,
No waste so vacant, but may well employ
Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart
Awake to Love and Beauty ! and sometimes
'Tis well to be bereft of promis'd good,
That we may lift the soul, and contemplate
With lively joy the joys we cannot share.
My gentle-hearted Charles ! when the last rook
Beat its straight path across the dusky air
Homewards, I blest it ! deeming its black wing
(Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light)
Had cross'd the mighty Orb's dilated glory,
While thou stood'st gazing ; or, when all was still,
Flew creeking o'er thy head, and had a charm
For thee, my gentle-hearted Charles, to whom
No sound is dissonant which tells of Life.

The Geranium

When I put her out, once, by the garbage pail,
She looked so limp and bedraggled,
So foolish and trusting, like a sick poodle,
Or a wizened aster in late September,
I brought her back in again
For a new routine--
Vitamins, water, and whatever
Sustenance seemed sensible
At the time: she'd lived
So long on gin, bobbie pins, half-smoked cigars, dead beer,
Her shriveled petals falling
On the faded carpet, the stale
Steak grease stuck to her fuzzy leaves.
(Dried-out, she creaked like a tulip.)

The things she endured!--
The dumb dames shrieking half the night
Or the two of us, alone, both seedy,
Me breathing booze at her,
She leaning out of her pot toward the window.
Near the end, she seemed almost to hear me--
And that was scary--
So when that snuffling cretin of a maid
Threw her, pot and all, into the trash-can,
I said nothing.

But I sacked the presumptuous hag the next week,
I was that lonely.

More poems by Theodore Roethke here: http://gawow.com/roethke/poems/220.html
Image taken from this site: www.stampinsusan.com

Shattered Head

A life hauls itself uphill
through hoar-mist steaming
the sun's tongue licking
leaf upon leaf into stricken liquid
When? When? cry the soothseekers
but time is a bloodshot eye
seeing its last of beauty its own
foreclosure
a bloodshot mind
finding itself unspeakable
What is the last thought?
Now I will let you know?
or, Now I know?
(porridge of skull-splinters, brain
tissue
mouth and throat membrane, cranial fluid)

Shattered head on the breast
of a wooded hill
Laid down there endlessly so
tendrils soaked into matted compost
became a root
torqued over the faint springhead
groin whence illegible
matter leaches: worm-borings, spurts of silt
volumes of sporic changes
hair long blown into far follicles
blasted into a chosen place

Revenge on the head (genitals, breast,
untouched)
revenge on the mouth
packed with its inarticulate confessions
revenge on the eyes
green-gray and restless
revenge on the big and searching lips
the tender tongue
revenge on the sensual, on the nose the
carrier of history
revenge on the life devoured
in another incineration

You can walk by such a place, the
earth is
made of them
where the stretched tissue of a field
or woods
is humid
with beloved matter
the soothseekers have withdrawn
you feel no ghost, only a sporic chorus
when that place utters its worn sigh
let us have peace

And the shattered head answers back

And I believed I was loved, I believed
I loved
Who did this to us?

Read more Rich at http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/adrienne_rich
Image by Karamel, sourced from http://images.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/Mushroom_Forest.jpg&imgrefurl=http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Mushroom_Forest.jpg&h=1200&w=1600&sz=1234&hl=en&start=12&um=1&usg=__Gl0tqeY7fAb27Q1JwzL2wwQGjhc=&tbnid=DvJm-PJ07CV3WM:&tbnh=113&tbnw=150&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dforest%2Bmushrooms%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DG

On Poetry: a Rhapsody

by Jonathan Swift, 1733

All human race would fain be wits,
And millions miss for one that hits.
Young's universal passion, pride,
Was never known to spread so wide.
Say, Britain, could you ever boast
Three poets in an age at most?
Our chilling climate hardly bears
A sprig of bays in fifty years;
While every fool his claim alleges,
As if it grew in common hedges.
What reason can there be assign'd
For this perverseness in the mind?
Brutes find out where their talents lie:
A bear will not attempt to fly;
A founder'd horse will oft debate,
Before he tries a five-barr'd gate;
A dog by instinct turns aside,
Who sees the ditch too deep and wide.
But man we find the only creature
Who, led by Folly, combats Nature;
Who, when she loudly cries, Forbear,
With obstinacy fixes there;
And, where his genius least inclines,
Absurdly bends his whole designs.

(This is just the first stanza. Read the rest at http://www.online-literature.com/swift/3515/)

Giant Grass

In dirt as warm as down
two boys build a fort from broken bamboo.

Plastic-soldiers, navy-frigate blue
and moulded into frozen attitudes of war,

squint to aim needle-guns at giant grass
and the outer-space of blue

eucalyptus. Sometimes in their sights,
the cursive curl and loop

of blackbirds
across the afternoon's hard light.

They plot onslaughts,
declare the wisdom of camouflage

and plunder the ground for rough twigs
of dead pine and leaves of dock.

And the closeness of dancing birds
calms and fixes my heart

as if forever on the lazy harbour,
the milky ocean,

as these soldiers safely wage
their strange and immobile war.

by Kay McKenzie Cook
from Made for Weather (Dunedin 2007)


Reproduced with kind permission from Kay McKenzie Cook
Image taken from http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/97/Four_US-Soldiers_watching_allied_bombardement.jpg/750px-Four_US-Soldiers_watching_allied_bombardement.jpg

l(a

l(a

l

e

af

fa

ll

s)
one
l

iness

by E.E. Cummings

Text from The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics by Lewis Turco

Nada poseo sino la palabra
el resto lo he perdido en el naufragio de los dias.
Nada poseo sino la palabra,
la palabra que ahora se escabulle dejandome solo.


I possess nothing but the word,
having lost the rest in the shipwreck of my days.
I possess nothing but the word,
the word now slipping away, leaving me on my own.


by Eduardo Chirinos,
trans. by G.J. Racz

Text taken from Mr. Knife Miss Fork: An Anthology of International Poetry #1 (Los Angeles 1998)
Image taken from Wikipedia Image:8 - AmStar 7.JPG

Winter

The wind keens on the bare hill;
The ford is froar, and the lake
Is hoar-crusted. A man's ilk
Might stand on a single stalk.

Comber after comber comes
To cover the shore. The gale
Hovers over the hill: owls
Crying. One cannot stand tall.

The bed of the fish is cold
In the ice where they shelter.
Reeds are bearded; the stag, starved.
Trees bow in the early dusk.

Snow falls, and the earth is pale.
Warriors sit near their fires.
The lake is a dim defile:
no warmth in its color.

Snow falls; the hoarfrost is white;
The shield is idle upon
The old man's shoulder. The wind
Freezes the grass with its whine.

Snow falls on top of the ice.
Wind sweeps the crest of the trees
Standing close. On his shoulder
The brave fighter's fine shield shines.

Anonymous Welsh translated by Lewis Turco

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics by Lewis Turco 3rd edition (London, 2000)
Image: http://images.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/42700000/jpg/_42700293_stag.jpg&imgrefurl=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/in_pictures/6466593.stm&h=300&w=416&sz=32&hl=en&start=7&um=1&tbnid=iAFEsTqWwfk23M:&tbnh=90&tbnw=125&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dstags%2Bsnow%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DG

Memento Mori

You wretched ghost, with clay bedight,
Think on me here in this plight!
I was a man, with a man's fear --
You shall be such as I am here.

An anonymous middle English epigram taken from The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics by Lewis Turco London, 2000. p.147

Image is a neanderthal skull:
http://images.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=http://www.dorlingkindersley-uk.co.uk/static/clipart/uk/dk/history/image_history001.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.dorlingkindersley-uk.co.uk/nf/ClipArt/Image/0,,239041_1583268_,00.html&h=298&w=464&sz=39&hl=en&start=109&um=1&tbnid=2Xmg14rfL87dvM:&tbnh=82&tbnw=128&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dskull%2Bclipart%26start%3D108%26ndsp%3D18%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26hs%3DYZh%26sa%3DN

Old English Riddle

I was a fighter; now a proud young fighter
wraps me in silver and gold,
and clinching wires. Sometimes men kiss me
sometimes I call good friends, singing,
to battle. Sometimes a warhorse
carries me across the battlefield. Sometimes
a wood horse carries me over the sea
sometimes a girl fills my ring-covered chest;
sometimes on tables, on hard boards,
I lie, decapitated by the fighters.
Sometimes, covered with jewels, I hang
on the wall near drinking men,
the noble gear of war: sometimes a soldier
will carry me on a horse -- then I blow,
swallow, etched with riches, from somebody's chest.
Sometimes I call warriors to wine;
sometimes I give back loot from thugs,
and put the wind up raiders...Guess me!


Note on the Text: The Exeter Book contains in all ninety-five riddles or fragments of
riddles in two groups (10-59, 60-95). This is number 14. Exeter Book Edition: Krapp, George Philip, and Elliot Van Kirk Dobbie, eds. The Exeter Book. ASPR 3. New York: Columbia UP, 1936.
Note on the Image: Two silver gilt drinking horns from Sutton Hoo http://images.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=http://www.nmia.com/~bohemond/Bootshop/horn-page/horn-images/horn-hoo-van.JPG&imgrefurl=http://www.nmia.com/~bohemond/Bootshop/horn-page/sutton_hoo_horn.htm&h=261&w=216&sz=29&hl=en&start=2&um=1&tbnid=wWWtdya3IyVogM:&tbnh=112&tbnw=93&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dsutton%2Bhoo%2Bhorn%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DG

Song to Spring (from East Greenland)

Aja-ha aja-ha
I was out in my kayak
making toward land.
Aja-ha aja-ha
I came to a snow-drift
that had just begun to melt.
Aja-hai-ja aja-hai-ja
And I knew that it was spring:
we'd lived through winter!
Aja-hai-ja aja-hai-ja
And I was frightened
I would be too weak,
too weak
to take in all that beauty!
Aja-hai-ja
Aja-hai-ja
Aja-ha


Text: Lowenstein, Tom (Translator) Eskimo Poems from Canada and Greenland. London: Anchor Press. 1973, p. 47
Image: ‘Snowdrift’ 1901 Edward Onslow Ford (1852 – 1901)
http://images.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ladylever/collections/graphics/large/snowdrift_large.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ladylever/collections/snowdrift.asp&h=371&w=500&sz=25&hl=en&start=1&um=1&tbnid=70vhE2zOwRmijM:&tbnh=96&tbnw=130&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dsnow%2Bdrift%2Bedward%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DG

I Married Poetry

As a student I married Poetry,
as soon as we met, she knew I was gone;

All the other girls fell out of my mind.

She only agreed to marry me
because I'd die without her near.
And we really were a match made in heaven

our best man and bridesmaid were Dream and Vision.

Poetry's busy with all of our kids,
she's pasty with years of being shut in.
Having left her palace in the clouds
the bride now wanders in a kind of daze…

They blame her for being too angry and sad
refusing to wear a pretty face

or to sell herself for the Party cause…

Her faith has only brought her pain,
we've shared unspeakable tales.

- Darling, will your loyalty ever end?
- Yes, the first day you tell me a lie!


Nguyen Chi Thien spent 27 years between 1961 and 1991 in Vietnamese prisons for anti-propaganda (initially for correcting a textbook's claim that the Japanese surrendered to the Russians).

"Those who live in a free world," he says, "can hardly imagine the living conditions of prisoners. Being always very hungry, they ate everything they could catch: mice, rats, spiders, snakes, lizards, etc. In a short time, all insects around the camp were exterminated. Prisoners had to do it secretly, if the guards noticed them swallowing, prisoners would immediately get shackled. People were dying one after another. As far as an eye could see, there were graves around the labor camp everywhere."

Read more about Mr Nguyen at:

• http://en.epochtimes.com/news/6-5-2/41077.html -- by Natalie Teplitsky
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nguyen_Chi_Thien

Poem translation by KD; Quote taken from The Epoch Times, http://en.epochtimes.com/news/6-5-2/41077.html -- by Natalie Teplitsky; Read more about Mr Nguyen at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nguyen_Chi_Thien (photograph of the 'Hanoi Hilton' in 1970 also taken from the Wikipedia page)

Lines to a Garden Hose

Sprinkle, sprinkle, little hose
(You can't help it, I suppose)
The unsodded, fruitful dirt
Sodden with thy sudden squirt!

Squirt and sprinkle, gentle hose,
Drowning less torrential woes;
Giving merry worms their drink,
Softly squirtle, sweetly sprink!

As in other, larger floods
Rainbows glint thy fertile muds,
So, assured of final calm,
Through thy nozzle pour thy balm!

Make the sidewalk and the street
Moist for parched and weary feet;
Keep thy rivulets a-flow;
Tripping each fantastic toe;

Seek thy brethren on the limb,
Fetching them into the swim;
Till , as each doth pass the fence
Scattering his eloquence,

Uttereth each a single note,
Like thee, from his liquid throat,
And the idlest, as she goes,
Darns the customary hose!

Then, thy simple duty done,
Quit, as erstwhile quits the sun,
With the other hoes to bed,
Coiling in thy shadowy shed!

Gardeners proclaim thy praise,
Children love thy childlike ways:
May we, like them, learn from thee
Irresponsibility!

Anonymous
The Humbler Poets (second series): A Collection of Newspaper and Periodical Verse 1885-1910 by Wallace and Frances Rice (1910, NY reprinted 1972)

A Noiseless Patient Spider

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

Walt Whitman 1868

Taken from Nineteenth-Century American Poetry ed. Spengemann & Roberts (1996)
Image (ancient geoglyph near Nazca, Peru) taken from: http://images.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=http://www.fortunecity.com/roswell/barada/267/Siriusly/nazca-spider.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.fortunecity.com/roswell/barada/267/Siriusly/ancient-nazca.html&h=300&w=240&sz=10&hl=en&start=58&um=1&tbnid=okoxnYW3EWAGAM:&tbnh=116&tbnw=93&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dancient%2Bspider%26start%3D42%26ndsp%3D21%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DN
See also: http://www.worldheritagesite.org/sites/nasca.html

Dreams

Oh that my young life were a lasting dream,
My spirit not awakening till the beam
Of an eternity should bring the morrow!
Yes, though that long dream were of hopeless sorrow,
'T were better than the cold reality
Of waking life to him whose heart must be,
And hath been still, upon the lovely earth,
A chaos of deep passion from his birth.
But should it be -- that dream eternally
Continuing, as dreams have been to me
In my young boyhood -- should it thus be given
'T were folly still to hope for higher heaven.
For I have revelled, when the sun was bright
I' the summer sky, in dreams of living light
and loveliness; have left my very heart
In climes of mine imagining, apart
From mine own home, with beings that have been
Of mine own thought -- what more could I have seen?
'T was once, and only once, and the wild hour
From my remembrance shall not pass -- some power
Or spell had bound me -- 't was the chilly wind
Came o'er me in the night and left behind
Its image on my spirit, or the moon
Shone on my slumbers in her lofty noon
Too coldly, or the stars -- howe'er it was,
That dream was as that night-wind -- let it pass.

I have been happy, though but in a dream.
I have been happy, and I love the theme;
Dreams! in their vivid coloring of life,
As in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife
Of semblance with reality which brings
To the delirious eye more lovely things
Of paradise and love -- and all our own! --
Than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.



By Edgar Allan Poe taken from Nineteenth-Century American Poetry ed. Spengemann & Roberts (1996)

Image taken from this website:
http://images.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=http://www.aboriginal-art.com/IMAGES/abo_life_images/bradshaw_figure.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.aboriginal-art.com/arn_pages/dreamings.html&h=400&w=294&sz=137&hl=en&start=51&um=1&tbnid=JSvB31qA5DtbTM:&tbnh=124&tbnw=91&prev=/images%3Fq%3Daborigine%2Bart%2Bdreamtime%26start%3D36%26ndsp%3D18%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DN

A Pilot from the Carrier

Strapped at the center of the blazing wheel,
His flesh ice-white against the shattered mask,
He tears at the easy clasp, his sobbing breaths
Misting the fresh blood lightening to a flame,
Darkening to smoke; trapped there in pain
And fire and breathlessness, he struggles free
Into the sunlight of the upper sky --
And falls, a quiet bundle in the sky,
The miles to warmth, to air, to waking:
To the great flowering of his life, the hemisphere
That holds his dangling years. In its long, slow sway
The world steadies and is almost still....
He is alone; and hangs in knowledge
Slight, separate, estranged: a lonely eye
Reading a child's first scrawl, the carrier's wake --
The travelling milk-like circle of a miss
Beside the plant-like genius of the smoke
That shades, on the little deck, the little blaze
Toy-like as the glitter of the wing-guns,
Shining as the fragile sun-marked plane
That grows to him, rubbed silver tipped with flame.

Randall Jarrell: The Complete Poems (Toronto, 1969) p.153

Ballad of the Army Carts

(A clay horse from the Tang Dynasty)

The carts squeak and trundle, the horses whinny, the conscripts go by, each with a bow and arrows at his waist. Their fathers, mothers, wives, and children run along beside them to see them off. The Hsien-yang Bridge cannot be seen for dust. They pluck at the men's clothes, stamp their feet, or stand in the way weeping. The sound of their weeping seems to mount up to the blue sky above. A passer-by questions the conscripts, and the conscripts reply:

"They're always mobilizing now! There are some of us who went north at fifteen to garrison the River and who are still, at forty, being sent to the Military Settlements in the west. When we left as lads, the village headman had to tie our head-cloths for us. We came back white-haired, but still we have to go back for frontier duty! On those frontier posts enough blood has flowed to fill the sea; but the Martial Emperor's dreams of expansion remain unsatisfied. Haven't you heard, sir, in our land of Han, throughout the two hundred prefectures east of the mountains briers and brambles are growing in thousands of little hamlets; and though many a sturdy wife turns her own hand at the hoeing and ploughing, the crops grow just anywhere, and you can't see where one field ends and the next begins? And it's even worse for the men from Ch'in. Because they make such good fighters, they are driven about this way and that like so many dogs or chickens.

"Though you are good enough to ask us, sir, it's not for the likes of us to complain. But take this winter, now. The Kuan-hsi troops are not being demobilized. The District Officers press for the land-tax, but where is it to come from? I really believe it's a misfortune to have sons. It's actually better to have a daughter. If you have a daughter, you can at least marry her off to one of the neighbors; but a son is born only to end up lying in the grass somewhere, dead and unburied. Why look, sir, on the shores of the Kokonor the bleached bones have lain for many a long year, but no one has ever gathered them up. The new ghosts complain and the old ghosts weep, and under the grey and dripping sky the air is full of their baleful twitterings."


source: http://www.emule.com/poetry/?page=poem&poem=2890
Author (Tu Fu) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Du_Fu
Translator (David Hawkes [1967]). A Little Primer of Tu Fu. Oxford University Press. ISBN 962-7255-02-5.